


Cocytus

by MajorEnglishEsquire



Series: Prompt Responses [11]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Horror, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-06
Updated: 2014-03-06
Packaged: 2018-01-14 17:45:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1275361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MajorEnglishEsquire/pseuds/MajorEnglishEsquire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><a href="http://kngfishergrl.tumblr.com/">kngfishergrl</a>: Sam/Lucifer, Dean. Dean giving Lucifer the "if you hurt him, I'm gonna gank you." speech.</p>
<p>
  <b>Please read the tags and consider them warnings.</b>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cocytus

Lucifer is unused to being unconscious. That is the first surprising part about waking up.

The second most surprising part is the warm breath beating over his fingers.

There are other things rising, bits of information surfacing. The startling, sharp pain in the back of his head, like someone took the end of an angel blade and cracked it into his skull like a hammer with a nail.

The damp. The smell.  
Of rot and of pain. There's blood in the air and a staleness washing out of it. Like a door has been opened on a long-locked room.

The fuzz of whatever made him unconscious clears from his eyes and he can see shapes. Can see that the light is limited. Before, he did not attempt to move a muscle, not wishing to betray to that uneven breath at his hand that he was awake.

Now, he attempts to move more than his eyelids and finds it a monumental effort. He gets a muscle in his calf to work, to slide his lower leg and foot across the floor a little. He can hear his boot crackle over cement as it goes.

The breath speeds. A dry-- something, of an uncomfortable texture, moves over the tips of his fingers.

There's a sharp tap with a tinny echo, metal whacking metal. The breath, whatever it was, it disappears.

"Awake?" he hears Dean Winchester ask.

His throat will not obey, will not push his words up to his mouth. He doesn't think, even if he could, that they would escape from behind his teeth in any way that made sense.

"Almost, huh? That's good. I want to you absorb this."

Dean doesn't speak again for a while, but eventually Lucifer can really feel his eyes on him, watching as his senses become less dull, as he does, in fact, absorb his surroundings.

Bars. He's in a cage. Once he figures that much out, there's a thrill of rage-tinged panic that shoots all up and down him. He is still on the mortal plane, he has been removed from Sam's company, and somehow he's been imprisoned by Dean. What little power remains in him since the fall, since he was dragged back to earth, is dulled by whatever Dean did to him.

There's a chemical taste of medication getting lost somewhere inside him, being processed steadily out of the body. And the pain in his head hints at a blow strong enough to rattle his vessel's brain in its casing.

The cage becomes clearer though the room is still dark. So does the occupant of the next cell that he shares bars with. He concentrates most on the muscles in his arm. When they twitch, at last, he twitches them out from where they fell, across the bottom rail of the cell and peeking into the next.

It breathes on him. It is curious. It puts its twisted, scarred mouth on his fingers until he's able to pull them away.

"Best I can figure," Dean says after a while, "is that the Men of Letters left them like this."

Them, he says. So there's more than one. Likely there's another cell behind him that he can't yet turn to see.

"So they trapped these monsters and intended to do what? Experiments. I donno. I don't care. Some of them have been experimented on. Clearly. And just left that way. You should see them. They've been strung up that way for six, seven, eight decades," Dean explains.

"I know about The Cage. Sam didn't tell me much, but from what he did tell me, you had a grand old time in your cage, in Hell, Lucifer. You and your brother, terrifying Adam. Sam burned and you didn't hurt him other than what Hell itself does to everybody. That's a point in your favor, Lucy. I'm glad for what little protection you provided to Sam in the pit. I am. But that doesn't change who you are. That doesn't change you in essentials. You've been with him, what, seven months now? And back here in the bunker two weeks. You know what Sam said to me the other day?" Dean laughs a little, strained. "He said he loves you. Sam said. That he loves you."

Dean is silent for a while.

"Can't change that. I can't make that different and I will agree that something about you _has_ changed. You're not the all-powerful bad guy anymore. I may have to have you under my roof.... But, well. I thought, you might as well know what else is living here with you."

Dean paces into view. Lucifer's lying at an angle where he's looking at him through the bars of the adjacent cage. Every so often the mangled creature in the next cell slides into view, mute but curious, and out of his line of sight again.

"Sam hasn't found this place. I've fixed up the walls so he won't ever find it, either. I put most of their old experiments out of their misery. Then I thought. Well. See, there's this guy. Vampire. Name's Benny. I thought, I can't be doing this. I can't send these things down into Purgatory while Benny's still stuck in there. Some of these things, man. They're twisted. They're so alone and starving and broken. After being beaten and tortured, poked at. Flayed. They were just hung up like jerky to see how they aged."

Dean paces away. "Gotta say. I'm no scientist? But I think it didn't work out so well. Some of these Men of Letters musta been some scary assholes."

Dean forces admiration into his voice. It's fake.

Lucifer can now clearly see the mutated, boiled mass of drooping, exposed veins in the cell next to him. It's some kind of mangled rougarou.

If Dean wouldn't force these creatures on the denizens of Purgatory, he wouldn't admire what's happened here. He's putting on a show.

Lucifer must admit:  
he's paying attention.

He can shift enough to sprawl out on his back now. Dean comes closer to smile down at him, malevolent.

"Sam doesn't know where this is. You don't know where this is. And I know you don't have enough mojo anymore to find out. I also know what it takes to knock you out. How _easy_ it is now. So let me make this crystal clear for you. You fuck up my brother? You feed him demon blood or try to get him to end the world? Or if you mistreat him, or if you hit him-- I don't care if he wanted to spar; you say 'no'. If you shout at him. If you get into a fucking car wreck while he's trying to teach you human lessons. If you make him cry by letting him watch the end of _SLC Punk_ one more fucking time. I don't care what it is, Lucifer."

Dean's voice drops.  
A whisper, a promise.

"I will bring you back here. I will leave you in a cage with one of these things. Maybe all of these things. We got a djinn in one of the vaults back there," he points with his blade behind Lucifer's cage, beyond where he can see. "I can't imagine why there's gotta be five inches of steel between us and him but it looks like he cracked about fifty years back and the screaming? Well, I wouldn't wanna know what nightmares he could induce. You can read a djinn's history on their skin. It's written there. Most of 'em look like they're covered in tribal ink. This one looks like he got tattooed head to toe with an industrial staple gun."

Dean shrugs. "Maybe I'll just introduce you before we leave."

Lucifer has enough muscle control now to breathe in deep, inhale, exhale, and shake his head firmly, once.

"Okay, then. Alright. You get the message?"

Lucifer steadies himself. He can't really lift his head to do it properly, but he approximates a nod.

"Great!" Dean puts the blade down on the bench behind him and claps his hands once, loud enough to startle all the jumpy little creatures cowering in who-knows-how-many cells. In the deep, unlit recesses of this dungeon. There's skittering. A piercing scream, far off. Just one, startled. Dean lets the echo of it fade.

"And I'm confident you wouldn't tell Sam about this, either," he says, drawing a modified pistol off the bench. "Knowing these things even existed? Well, that would make Sam emotional. And sometimes when Sam's emotional, he gets a little teary-eyed. And you know what happens if you make my brother cry, Lucifer." He sights down the gun and watches Lucifer's face until he nods again.

Dean lowers the gun to flash a brilliant, horrifying smile. "Good," he raises it again. Points and shoots. There's the light impact of the dart against skin that's just starting to get feeling back, and blackness pours in around Lucifer again.

«»

The grocery list is always larger than Dean lets anyone see. And Lucifer knows there's a freezer in the garage that he's decided Sam can't ever find.

He doesn't ever find that door. Can't find that set of dungeons again. But, really, he doesn't try looking too hard.

Sicker shit has happened in Hell. Surely Dean, unable to equal, in reality, the idea he wanted to scare into Lucifer during their encounter, has been nursing some of the creatures out of their insanity before putting them down. No doubt they fade out in a gentle sleep like the one Lucifer had awoken to after the second dart.

Dean doesn't threaten him with the angel blade again. Lucifer ushers Sam back into the living quarters when Dean comes back from "shopping."

Ultimately, the threats weren't necessary. Lucifer belongs to Sam. He wishes nothing more than to serve him now, to please him and earn his strange kindness in return. But he never comes close to giving Dean a reason. Never.

There's a joke about the Fear of God in there somewhere, but he won't be the one to make it.

He calls Dean his 'brother-in-law.'  
Sometimes, with all respect, he calls Dean 'brother.'


End file.
